Just as the nation as a whole sneaks up on surpassing the United States of America as the world’s foremost superpower (if it hasn’t already), China has become more and more important to the movie world in the last few years. Grosses for the relatively few American movies released there are huge (“Th...

Sarah Polley has a secret. It’s a secret that, remarkably, she kept under wraps to all but friends and family until the film screened at the Venice Film Festival this morning. It’s a secret that’s seemingly informed her two directorial efforts to date, “Away From Her” and “Take This Waltz,” and is t...

"It's not violence that sets men apart, it's the distance they're willing to go," Forrest Bondurant (Tom Hardy) tells his youngest brother Jack (Shia LaBeouf) in "Lawless." And with a set of brass knuckles in his pocket and a pistol in his waistband, he knows what he&...

In "The Possession," a new horror movie from Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert's Ghost House production shingle, a young girl becomes infatuated and then, yes, possessed by a dubious Jewish spirit that had been kept imprisoned in a wooden box. As far as horror movie premises go, this one is pretty outlandish...

Opening films at festivals are always worth approaching with a little caution. Normally given out-of-competition slots, it’s often a signal that the films have been selected to bring some starry names, and the attention that goes with them to the red carpet, or to make some kind of mission statement...

When a movie has as much going for it as this one, it’s discouraging when it doesn’t deliver on its promise. Yet 'Lawless' pulls the magician’s trick of distraction, offering enough superficial entertainment value—with atmospheric use of locations, charismatic actors, and spurts of shocking violence...

A few years ago there was a sort of mini-horror movie renaissance in France, with a bunch of talented young directors paying homage to their favorite American horror films the only way they knew how – by making them incredibly French. Under the stewardship of older French genre provocateurs (like Lu...

For all the talk of auteurs working on the small screen, and helping to bring in a new golden age of television – Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann etc. – it’s hardly a phenomenon only made up of HBO’s current output. Ingmar Bergman and Rainer Werner Fassbinder both turned to television in the 1980s, fo...

"The Day" runs about eighty-seven minutes in length. It features a number of recognizable actors. There's violence at the beginning, middle and end, and many characters die, mostly with an explosion of blood. The story takes place over the course of one day, and though the image is saturated, we see...

At the beginning of "The Red Chapel," the 2010 exposé of North Korean society directed by Danish comedian Mads Brügger, the filmmaker establishes his ruse from the outset, swiftly enunciating his intention to satirize the country's oppressive extremes by pretending to embra...